27 August 2017

Caroline and I found this
game a couple of weeks ago in the gamestore - I looked at it and was not really
sold. It was not until we watched some video reviews of it that convinced me to
fork over some cash for it. Cash well spent!

This game is a very nice
worker placement/resource management game with a heavy Viking theme. Someone
jokingly wrote that this is what Lords of Waterdeep would be if Lords of
Waterdeep had a theme. That may be stretching it (LoWD is a fantastic game), as
in Champions of Midgaard a lot of focus is put on managing your little warband
and their fighting of trolls, draugr and epic monsters to earn glory.

Each player takes on the
role of a Viking leader, and receives a character board with special rules for
your specific character and 8 slots to place warrior dice on. Your warband can
never exceed 8 warriors, and you can always replenish casualties during the
game, even if your warband is completely wiped out in a epic fight.

During each turn players take turns in placing their "workers" on
various spaces in the Viking village, in order to hire warriors, gather
supplies, hire boats to take you to faraway lands, hunt for meat in the forest,
visit various traders and also set up expeditions to the nearby hills where you
slay trolls and draugr that threaten the existence of the village. For killing
monsters your warband earn glory and gold, at the end of the game the player
with most glory wins. Glory is earned not only from killing monsters, but from
collecting monster cards. Collecting sets of a specific monster card in all
colors (for instance draugr: red/yellow/blue) earn you extra glory. You also
get glory from additional objective cards that you can pick up in the Viking
village - objectives that put gold, Viking warriors, meat and wood into play to
earn you more glory as well.

Most of the game revolves
around warrior dice, that represent 3 types of fighters that you can recruit
for your warband, swordsmen, spearmen and berserkers (in the expansion there
are archers). Each warrior type has its own "hit" and
"shield" results, the swordsmen are the weakest but they are usually
the easiest warrior to get. Spearmen are better at hitting and also defending,
while berserkers are pure damage and no defense.

During your turn you have
to reserve a spot on the board with a worker in order to put together an
expedition to slay a troll, draugr or epic monster. Trolls are special in that
they appear each turn and have to be killed. The player killing the troll earns
only glory and a piece of wood, but the remaining players get "blame
tokens" which deduct glory points at the end of game. The blame tokens
stack into devastating penalties depending on their number, and you can only
get rid of a blame token by killing trolls. Each time you become the troll
slayer during a turn you are allowed to discard a blame token.

Draugr give a bit of glory
but also become the main source of gold rewards. Then you have the epic
monsters which require you to hire/or buy a ship, load it up with food and
warriors and sail off to faraway lands to fight. During these ship expeditions
a random event occurs, which can inflict casualties by storm or loss of
additional food. You will lose warrior dice if you cannot feed all your
warriors before they arrive at their destination, and a weakened warband may
have a difficult time to fight the epic monsters. Considering that ship
expeditions yield the most glory points but also require the most preparation
it is not a failure you will take easily.

To make things more
interesting, many monsters are immune to specific warrior dice. A troll may be
immune to berserkers for instance, which means you will not be able to fight it
with berserker dice, and all berserker dice allocated to that fight become
casualties at the beginning of the battle! This is not something that randomly
occurs, the immunity is printed on the monster card - but it happens that one
forgets and sends a mixed warband only to see some of the warriors be removed
instantly when fighting begins.

The fighting with monsters
is quite interesting in all its simplicity. Monsters have a wound and attack
value printed on them. This means that to kill a monster you must score a
number of hits equal to the wounds. Then you must, ideally, counter the monster
attacks by rolling shield symbols during your attack action. Shields block one
point of damage. All unblocked damage results in killed warriors. This is also
why the super effective berserkers, often die, if not supported... Fighting
continues until either the monster or the player wins the fight or when both
sides end up dead.

Fortunately you will still
earn glory and get rewards even if all your warriors happen to die during the
encounter, I guess you worker/villager reports the success to the village
elders.

The game is very easy to
learn, fun to play and very fast paced. So far I've only played 2-3 player
games, the game supports 4 players at the most.

Caroline and I both rate the game as a solid 8/10.

I've been looking at the expansions, and they look quite interesting. I may have to get them in the near future.